1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a repairing method of a storage apparatus. More specifically, the present invention relates to a repairing method of a storage apparatus that proceeds on-line.
2. Description of the Conventional Art
A flash drive is a small, portable, computer peripheral storage device. The flash drive is mostly compliant to the standard universal serial bus (USB) communication interface. The flash drive may also be bridged to a computer platform equipped with a USB connection port, for example, a desktop personal computer, a notebook computer, a personal digital assistant (PDA), etc, to provide a user with a plug-and-play (PnP) type external data storage function. The flash drive has become a popular computer peripheral storage device in the present consumer market of computers as the flash drive is small, light, easy to carry around, and does not require external power supply or driver program installation to the computer platform.
Currently, the flash drive mostly uses a flash memory as its storage device. The flash memory itself includes a plurality of blocks. There are about eight thousand blocks in a 128 Mb flash memory device. Moreover, each of the blocks can be divided into a plurality of pages that generally ranges from 8 to 64 pages. When reading data from the flash memory, first, the location of the block to be read is to be identified, and the page to be read is searched from the target block. In order for the data reading to proceed successfully, a configure data is stored in the flash memory. When the data is written into or reading from the flash memory, the configure data is used to find the target block and page.
In light of the foregoing, when the configure data is damaged, the flash drive can not perform data writing and reading normally. As the configure data concerns the trade secret of each manufacturer, it can not be given to the user randomly. Therefore, in the conventional technique, when the configure data of the flash drive is damaged or lost, the user can not maintain the flash drive by himself/herself, but needs to send the flash drive to the maintenance center for maintenance. These actions are not only time and labor consuming, but the user also worries about whether or not the data stored in the flash drive would be disclosed.